Fellow technologists, I'd like to ask you: what the fuck is going on?
I graduated from Sussex University in 2025. During the length of my degree (which was not my first foray into Computer Science,) I witnessed the death of the Software Engineering industry. The industry I brought myself into chose to die right as I was about to join it.
I refuse to wear a mask and pretend everything is fine. I refuse to go into interviews to extol the virtues of Claude Code. I refuse to go to social events and debate among my peers endlessly about whether it is 'moral' to use an LLM. I refuse to play the game. I quit. You all can all spin up your robots and have them talk to each other for eternity. You don't need me, or anyone else in the rest of your sad little existences.
However,
I'll never be done making software. It will just have to be another hobby of mine, like playing the piano, or drawing, or cycling. Maybe I'll get bored of it entirely, hopefully. But I spent my whole life training for this. I can't let go just yet.
I just quit the job search. If someone offered me a position at an awesome company that never uses LLMs tomorrow? I'd take it in a heartbeat. But it won't happen, because I don't have the years of experience required. Everyone sensible that I know is either burnt out, looking for ways out of the industry, or never got into it in the first place.
What now.
I'm making software, in my free time off of work. All I can do, without being employed. I'm going to try put my efforts into open source projects where I can make real changes for the few people still making software. I'm currently working in Matrix clients on UX/UI.
One day I may give in, and find some work in industry. But I won't enjoy it. Industry is a place where nobody learns, and everybody slowly descends into becoming mini-managers. People are forgetting how to do their job in real time, and one day there will be no more training data left for these machines, software will stagnate, nothing will change, every website will look the same, every piece of software will break in new, unexpected ways, you will look at a computer from five years ago and wonder why it feels so much nicer to use.
The Industry Left Over
It will have a big contraction. This hiring freeze will be felt for years. The industry will get more male, more white, more straight, more fascist. We're seeing the effects in open source already: Software projects like Omarchy and Hyprland are coalescing into a movement of Fascist Open Source. My friends are constantly worrying about the next piece of software that's going to be 'infected' with permissive LLM policies and CLAUDE.md files. It's so tiring to use software nowadays, and even more tiring to make it.